Join us for a conversation with housing leaders about steps to close the minority home ownership gap now. 2017 has been a year of intense focus on housing. We are proud to close the "We Call This Home" conversation series for 2017 with a panel of local leaders focused on concrete next steps. Moderated by Janet Byrd, the panel will include Margaret Salazar, Director of Oregon Housing and Community Services, Ernesto Fonesca, the new Executive Director of Hacienda CDC, and Maxine Fitzpatrick, the Executive Director of Portland Community Reinvestment Initiative.

At this event, we'll talk with Portland leaders and activists working on creative ways to use land to mitigate the effects of the city's housing shortage and build more stable, prosperous communities. Our guests include Alan Hipólito, executive director of Verde, and John W. Haines, executive director of Mercy Corps Northwest. Adam Davis, executive director of Oregon Humanities, will moderate the conversation.

Verde is a social enterprise and advocacy organization focused on building environmental wealth through projects benefiting low-income communities and communities of color. It is a founding partner in Living Cully, a collaborative effort with Habitat for Humanity Portland/Metro East, Hacienda Community Development Corporation, and Native American Youth and Family Center that reinterprets sustainability as an anti-poverty strategy by concentrating environmental investments at the neighborhood scale.

Mercy Corps Northwest provides a variety of programs to assist low-income citizens of Oregon and Washington to create more productive, secure, and satisfying lives for themselves, their families, and their communities. Their efforts include the first-ever community investment trust, a financial arrangement designed to enable people to make small investments in commercial property in their community.

Think & Drink takes place at the Alberta Rose Theatre, 3000 NE Alberta St., from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m. We hope you'll stick around after the program for free snacks and conversation. Minors welcome when accompanied by an adult.

The hidden cost of being African American in the United States includes an unrelenting cycle of intergenerational poverty for many families. In his forthcoming book, Thomas Shapiro reveals how "The lack of family assets along with continuing racial discrimination in crucial areas like homeownership dramatically impact the everyday lives of many black families, reversing gains earned in schools and on jobs, and perpetuating the cycle of poverty in which far too many find themselves trapped."

He will join Jesse Beason, Vice President of Public Affairs with the NW Health Foundation for a conversations that connects national problems to local realities. Prior to joining the Foundation, Jesse served as Executive Director of Proud Ground, and as Senior Policy Director of Housing, Culture and Planning for then-Commissioner Sam Adams.

Join these two dynamic speakers to learn about the hidden costs of the racial wealth gap – and visible solutions developed by communities in need.

2017 Think & Drink series asks big questions about the place where we live. Who owns it? Who gets to live on it? And who decides its future?

Join us Wednesday, March 15 at the Alberta Rose Theatre for a conversation about the future of housing and urban development in Portland with civic leaders and developers poised to make it happen, including Greg Goodman, copresident of Downtown Development Group; Kimberly Branam, executive director of the Portland Development Commission, and Anyeley Hallová, a partner at the Portland real-estate development firm project^.

In five years, most homes inside Portland's city center will be out of reach for most Portland families. This leaves many families in Portland with no opportunity to become owners close to jobs, schools, public parks and the social and financial centers of the city.

This is the stunning conclusion that Portland Housing Center and EcoNorthwest draw from analysis of current real estate and economic trends. What does this mean for our growing city? Is this outcome inevitable? How can we learn from our history of inequality to ensure that we develop policies and planning tools to change the tide, and keep Portland affordable and welcoming to the next generation? Join Dr. Lisa Bates, professor of urban studies at Portland State University and Lorelei Juntunen, partner a the economic consulting firm EcoNorthwest, for a look at how we got here – and new ideas about how to move forward.

In partnership with Multnomah County Library and The Library Foundation, Literary Arts is proud to present a lecture by Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City as the culminating event of the 15th annual Everybody Reads.

Through the lives of eight low-income families, Evicted sheds light on the complex issues surrounding housing and its link to poverty. The book was selected as a New York Times Editor’s Choice, and Wall Street Journal’s Hottest Spring Nonfiction Books.

Michelle Alexander, author of "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness," will join us for a lecture and Q&A on Tuesday, February 7 at 6:00 p.m. at Reed College. A book signing will follow the lecture.

About The New Jim Crow: The New Jim Crow is a stunning account of the rebirth of a caste-like system in the United States, one that has resulted in millions of African Americans locked behind bars and then relegated to a permanent second-class status - denied the very rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights Movement. By targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of colorblindness. The New Jim Crow challenges all of us to place mass incarceration at the forefront of the movement for racial justice in America. Called "stunning" by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Levering Lewis, "invaluable" by the Daily Kos, "explosive" by Kirkus,and "profoundly necessary" by the Miami Herald, The New Jim Crow, with a foreword by Cornel West, is a must-read for all people of conscience.

About Michelle Alexander: Michelle Alexander is a highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate, and legal scholar. Alexander is an associate professor of law at The Ohio State University and holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. Prior to joining the Kirwan Institute, Professor Alexander was formerly the director of the ACLU's Racial Justice Project in Northern California and an Associate Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, where she directed its Civil Rights Clinics.

This event is free and open to the public. An ASL interpreter will be provided. For information on getting to Reed, please visit: https://www.reed.edu/getting-to-reed.html. Question, concerns, or accommodation requests can be made to institutional.diversity@reed.edu.

A Deeper Black: Race in AmericaTa-Nehisi Coates, author of Between the World and Me, winner of the 2015 National Book Award for nonfiction, national correspondent for The Atlantic.

Join the simulcast event in Portland at the White Stag building, or see below for details about the live event at the Knight Arena in Eugene.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of the most original and perceptive black voices today—“the single best writer on the subject of race in the United States” (New York Observer). Coates is the author, most recently, of Between the World and Me, the #1 New York Times bestseller that “will be hailed as a classic of our time” (Publishers Weekly) and which Toni Morrison calls “required reading.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates does not tend to pre-write his keynotes. He talks extemporaneously, forcefully, on the events of the day-sometimes, that literal day-and incorporates themes from his writing. Lately, his focus is on the systemic racism that is inseparable from the growth of the nation: the racist policies that have plundered black bodies, black property, and black lives for economic and social gain. How can we reconcile these acts, many of them ongoing, with the supposedly postracial country some claim we are moving towards? Other related topics include the distressing series of murders of unarmed black people that has rocked the country and dominated headlines. Coates does not offer a casual "snapshot," does not provide easy answers, and does not dole out false hope. He engages audiences in a meaningful, historically-grounded, up-to-the-minute discussion on what it means to talk-really talk-about race today.

The Robert and Mabel Ruhl Endowment, which has supported an annual Ruhl Lecture at the School of Journalism and Communication since 1976, was established by Mabel W. Ruhl, Robert’s widow, to “foster mutually beneficial contact between the School of Journalism and Communication and the mass media.”

It honors Robert W. Ruhl, publisher and editor of the Medford Mail Tribune, who was Oregon’s archetypal crusading small-town newspaperman. His editorial battle against the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s earned him the respect of other Oregon journalists, and his paper’s fight against a radical local “populist” movement brought him the Pulitzer Prize in 1934 for distinguished and meritorious public service. Ruhl died in 1967.

Learn more about attending the live event at the Knight Arena in Eugene here: https://calendar.uoregon.edu/event/ta-nehisi_coates_9880?utm_campaign=widget&utm_medium=widget&utm_source=University+of+Oregon#.WHw-cHfMzMU

Our City faces a housing crisis. Current policy and media attention has focused on the urgent needs of shelter and escalating rents. But the problem is not just economic, it’s deeper – and longer reaching.

At this event, civic leaders in Oregon will launch a yearlong series of conversations, "We Call This Home: Wealth, Home Ownership, and Race" that will focus on one of the toughest challenges facing our growing city – How do we ensure that the decisions we make as a growing city reflect both the wisdom we've gained through our shared history of inequality, and also the visions we share for a safe, abundant, and affordable place for all to live?

Join Oregon Humanities January 25 at the Alberta Rose Theatre in Portland for a Think & Drink on the history of discrimination in land ownership and the effects of this history on identity and belonging. In Oregon, only 30 percent of Black families own their home, compared to 62 percent of white families. Nationally, Black Americans own less than 1 percent of private agricultural land.

Why is land ownership so unequal? At this event, the first in our 2017 Portland Think & Drink series, we’ll explore how Black Oregonians and other communities of color have been affected by exclusionary land ownership policies. Our guests are Rhea Combs of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gwen Carr of Oregon Black Pioneers, and Melissa Lowery, director of the documentary Black Girl in Suburbia. The conversation will be moderated by Adam Davis, executive director of Oregon Humanities.

We Call This Home is proudly presented by Portland Housing Center, in partnership with : Agora Journalism Center at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication, City Club of Portland, EcoNorthwest, Neighborhood Partners, North Star Civic Foundation, Open:Housing, Oregon Humanities, with support from J.P. Morgan Chase, HomeStreet Bank and Wells Fargo.